Amy Traub is the Director of Research at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. This is an edited version of testimony delivered to a Senate staff briefing on immigration issues.
What is the problem that undocumented workers pose for the middle class? In other words, why does it matter to ordinary American citizens if the person working next to them actually isn’t authorized to work in this country?
Some argue that it matters because unauthorized workers are breaking the law. They contrast undocumented immigrants with those who came into the U.S. legally, waited in line, became permanent residents and ultimately cared about this country enough to become American citizens. If that’s what concerns you about unauthorized immigrant workers, a proposed Employment Eligibility Verification System is a big problem.
It’s a problem because those immigrants who have done everything right under our current system and who have finally become naturalized American citizens are the most likely to be unfairly penalized by EEVS. Employers feed their information into the system and 11 percent of the time, according to the latest evaluation, the answer they get it that this person, this U.S. citizen, is someone without proper documentation who’s not authorized to work. That’s an error rate of more than one in 10 when it comes to foreign-born U.S. citizens.
Hopefully, the employee gets this cleared up. But in the meantime, many employers aren’t using the system the way they’re supposed to. They restrict work assignments, delay training, or reduce pay. Some don’t notify employees that the system said they were unauthorized and so they have no opportunity to contest it and get their paperwork straightened out. Any U.S. citizen who gets an erroneous indication that they’re not authorized to work faces these problems if they have an unscrupulous employer. But it’s particularly likely to happen to naturalized citizens because the error rate for them is so high.
The worst-case scenario comes if an employer is improperly using the system to pre-screen everyone who applies for a job. In that case, this immigrant who has followed all the rules and become a U.S. citizen is simply never hired at all because the system erroneously says that they’re not authorized to work. And chances are they wouldn’t even know any of this had occurred; they missed out on a job without knowing why and without having a chance to fix it. So, if you care about rewarding those who played by the rules, this system is very problematic, and according to the 2006 evaluation sent to the Department of Homeland Security, fixing it "will not be easy or fast."
I think there’s a bigger problem for the middle class with having lots of unauthorized workers in the U.S. economy. And that is that undocumented workers are easy to exploit and once you have exploitation in the economy, it exerts a downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of middle-class and aspiring middle-class American workers. Certainly, most employers are not out there looking for workers to exploit, but if you are an unscrupulous employer, if you want to pay below minimum wage and cut costs by having substandard, unsafe working conditions, there’s no one better to hire than an undocumented immigrant. They don’t know their rights and you can threaten to call the immigration authorities if they complain. And when this type of underground workforce with substandard conditions becomes the norm in an industry, all employers in that industry feel pressure to compete on that level. And many jobs in that industry quickly become ones that will no longer support a middle-class standard of living for Americans.
That’s a complicated argument, and I don’t want to go into more detail on it now. If you’re interested, we have a report that lays it all out very simply. The question is: does EEVS help solve this problem of an underground workforce that threatens the wages and working conditions of the American middle class?
I’d argue that it doesn’t solve the problem and in fact makes it worse. It doesn’t solve the problem because there are a lot of ways around the system. Employers can hire unauthorized workers off the books and pay them under the table. That happens now, and would increase with EEVS. Unauthorized workers who can’t get a job any other way could work as nominally independent contactors, where they would likely face even greater exploitation. Employers could hire through fly-by-night temp agencies that disappear when there is enforcement action.
In each of these scenarios, we see undocumented workers pushed further underground, in even less of a position to exercise their rights – and they do have these rights – to earn the minimum wage, to have decent working conditions. As the employment relationship becomes more informal, the potential for exploitation increases. That’s one way EEVS makes the problem of an underground workforce worse for middle-class Americans.
EEVS also provides yet another tool for unscrupulous employers to intimidate and threaten undocumented workers. A study of the Social Security no-match letter program illustrates how this can happen. According to this research, when employers received notification from the Social Security Administration that an employee might not be authorized to work in the U.S., many fired these employees—but not right away. Twenty-give percent of employees report they were fired after complaining about substandard working conditions. Another 21 percent report they were fired for trying to organize a union. Many report that they weren’t fired at all, but their wages were cut, or their benefits were reduced after their employer found out they were unauthorized. Like no-match letters, EEVS can be a tool for employers who discover that their employees are unauthorized to try to intimidate them into accepting more exploitative working conditions.
To sum up: EEVS can harm American workers, especially naturalized citizens who have played by all the rules, through its high rate of falsely reporting that people are unauthorized to work. But it also harms the American middle-class indirectly by driving undocumented workers further underground, increasing the exploitation in the U.S. labor market.
If we want to be enforcing anything about the current system, we should be enforcing wage and hour laws, workplace safety standards, and other employment and labor laws. That’s what really impacts the current and aspiring middle-class Americans at work.
